Reflections on Nature, Group show

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
This upcoming week (from Wednesday 6th till Sunday 10th February) the gallery will be closed. You can find us at Art Rotterdam, at booth n 76!

Our very first show of 2019 will feature the works of three artists of the gallery: Atousa Bandeh, Matea Bakula and Joseph Semah.
The group show deals with what we consider an urgency that is worth to be addressed in this early part of the year, with the hope it will rise the right awareness in our audience: as the title suggests, all the artworks presented in the exhibition relay on the binomial controversy between natural and artificial, in order to analyze the presence of Nature in such a man-centered world.

The arisen reflections also lead to a necessary confrontation with the role of animals and their involvement in contemporary society: through Bakula’s beeswax sculptures, through Bandeh’s large canvas where plastic bags become the main protagonists of this weirdly aesthetic composition, and through Semah’s bronze rabbit lying on the floor, we would like to begin a provocative visual conversation over Nature, to help rise awareness towards the present and the future history of the world we are living in, while also growing a substantial understanding on the importance of animals and natural sources and materials.

Atousa Bandeh (1968, Iran)
After her studies in physics and astronomy, she studied visual arts from 1992 to 1995 at the Minerva Art Academy in Groningen and received her MFA in 2002 at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, graduating in video and film. In large drawings Atousa Bandeh combines images from her memories of life in Iran with everyday objects that are symbolic of underlying events. The drawings are colorful and dreamy, but there are also threatening elements.

Matea Bakula (Sarajevo, 1990) graduated from HKU Utrecht in 2013 and currently lives in Utrecht. As an emerging talent in the Dutch scene, Bakula is also nominated for the NN Group Award 2019.
In her creating process she is looking beyond the aesthetics of the material she is using. Bakula almost works like a chemist or a physicist that is trying to find the answers of the material’s secrets.

Joseph Semah (1948, Iraq) grew up in Tel Aviv, Israel. After finishing gymnasium, Semah studied Electronics and Philosophy at the University of Tel Aviv. At the same time he was developing as an artist. Since 1982 Semah resides in Amsterdam, where he founded the Makkom Foundation, which in the 1980s organized projects based on interdisciplinary research in the arts.
Semah’s work is best described as a profound and wide-ranging exploration of the links between language and a man made images. A scholar of many classical texts, he creates his own conceptual and pictorial world as part of his quest, placing human beings at the centre of this world.